‘Anything but New Zealand sauvignon blanc!’ A friend muttered as we perused a wine list recently. It’s claimed that eight out every ten bottles of wine sold on Australia’s Sunshine Coast are NZ sauvignon blanc so it is hardly surprising that locals’ palates are jaded.

Nothing wrong with the stuff, occasionally – but every day? Like watching endless re-runs of Frasier – monotonous.

The river of NZSB flowing into Australia has turned into a torrent. And especially at the cheap end there tends to be a certain sameness of style: underdone, lightweight, green grassy, acidic and thin.

At least Australian SBs exhibit a wide range of styles – from tropical to cool climate, but to this palate NZSB has become a cold-climate, one–dimensional trip. I mean, how many hits of hyper-methoxypyrazine can a wine drinker handle in a year? It’s almost enough to drive one back to Australian over-oaked chardonnay.